Meta

Finding Out How Many GPU Cores We Have Under Linux, Revisited!

In this earlier posting, I tried to describe in a roundabout way, what the shader cores of a GPU – the Graphics Processing Unit – actually do.

And in this earlier posting, I tried to encourage even Linux-users to find out approximately how many GPU cores they have, given a correct install of the open standard OpenCL – for actual GPU computing – using the command-line tool ‘clinfo’. But that use of ‘clinfo’ left much to be desired, including the fact that sometimes, OpenCL will only assign a maximum number of cores belonging to each core group, that’s a power of 2, even if there may be a non-power-of-two number of cores.

Well, if we have the full set of nVidia drivers installed, nVidia CUDA – which is a competitor to OpenCL, as well as having the nVidia Settings GUI installed, it turns out that there is a much-more accurate answer:

But, this method has as drawback, that it’s only available to us, when we have both nVidia hardware, and the proprietary drivers installed. This could lead some people to the false impression, that maybe, only nVidia graphics cards have real GPUs?